Introduction Cancer is a major public health problem. Currently, one in four deaths in the United States is due to cancer [25]. A total of 1,372,910 new cancer cases and 570,280 deaths are expected in the United States in 2005. When deaths are aggregated by age, cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death for persons younger than 85 since 1999 [25]. The three most common ca...

abstract: colorectal cancer (crc) is the third most common cancer in men and the second most common cancer in women worldwide. both genetic and epigenetic alterations are common in crc and are the driving force of tumorigenesis. chromosomal instability, microsatellite instability and cpg island methylator phenotype pathways are responsible for genetic instability in colorectal cancer. chromosom...

One of the notable fields in studying the genetics of cancer is disease gene identification which affects disease treatment and drug discovery. Many researches have been done in this field. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are one of them that focus on the identification of diseases-susceptible loci on chromosomes. Recently, computational approaches, known as gene prioritization methods h...

Antisense oligodeoxynucleotides can selectively block disease-causing genes, and cancer genes have been chosen as potential targets for antisense drugs to treat cancer. However, nonspecific side effects have clouded the true antisense mechanism of action and hampered clinical development of antisense therapeutics. Using DNA microarrays, we have conducted a systematic characterization of gene ex...

Breast cancer susceptibility genes 1 and 2 (BRCA1 and BRCA2) mutations are associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndromes (HBOC). However, certain individuals with breast cancer do not meet high-risk factors for hereditary breast cancer screening based on age, family history, and biology of malignancy. We present a patient with relapsed breast cancer who developed progressive di...

During malignant transformation, cancer cells acquire genetic alterations that surmount the normal controls regulating proliferation and cell survival. High-resolution comparative genomic analyses reveal that genomic instability is a hallmark of cancer development and that cancer-causing mutations are only a tiny fraction of the genetic modifications, most of which are “bystander” mutations. Th...

Malignant primary brain tumors, gliomas, often overexpress both platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) ligands and receptors providing an autocrine and/or paracrine boost to tumor growth. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most frequent glioma. Its aggressive and infiltrative growth renders it extremely difficult to treat. Median survival after diagnosis is currently only 12-14 months. The pre...